Is test worth $5.93 each?

Some Regents exams at risk or districts could be billed, education chief says

By JIMMY VIELKIND Capitol bureau

Published 12:21 am, Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Courtesy Kyle Hughes, NYSNYS.

Media: Times Union

ALBANY -- Unless another $15 million materializes, the State Education Department will be forced to either cut some of its signature Regents examinations or start charging school districts for the privilege of having students take them.

"Frankly, the Regents exams are the pillar -- the cornerstone, if you will -- of a $54 billion educational enterprise. There is something wrong with putting that at risk, I would suggest, with a $15 million shortfall," Education Commissioner David Steiner testified Tuesday before a legislative budget hearing.

It costs $5.93 per student to administer the test, the commissioner said. Steiner described that as an "unfunded mandate -- let's be honest about that."

Federal law requires testing in English language arts and mathematics, but Steiner said exams in foreign languages, U.S. history and government, global history and geography, earth science, chemistry, physics and geometry might be on the chopping block.

"To narrow education to just English and math is the wrong way to go," he said. Nationally, President Barack Obama has asked for a focus on math and science.

The cut is a small amount of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's overall budget for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, which begins April 1. Steiner was relatively agnostic about the much larger cuts proposed to school aid -- so long as they are apportioned to minimize potential harm to the most hard-pressed school districts.

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Rhetoric around the $1.5 billion school aid cut intensified Tuesday, with the governor appearing on Talk 1300 AM to decry the "education bureaucracy" just as his lieutenant, Bob Duffy, testified at the budget hearing to the same effect.

"We have to look at what we have spent money on, and why are we still 34th in the nation? If we were number one in spending and number one in results, we probably wouldn't be having the conversation across the state -- but we're not," Duffy said. "So much of the money we spend ... gets invested in bureaucracy, and it gets invested in areas that do not touch the lives of children."

Steiner later countered the state's ranking, which is based on the number of people over age 29 with a high school diploma. By other educational yardsticks, New York ranks much higher, including the percentage of students passing Advance Placement exams.

Several legislators, including Sen. Andrew Lanza, R-Staten Island, called Cuomo's proposed cuts "indefensible" and "violative of a standing court order" -- one of several references at Tuesday's hearing to the 2006 Court of Appeals ruling in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case. Per the judges' order, Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2007 promised a total increase in education aid of $7 billion. Cuomo's cuts are scaling back on that promise.

About a dozen people organized by New York State United Teachers, disrupted the hearing by shouting "Don't kill the CFE!" They wore shirts reading "protect kids, not millionaires," a reference to the proposal by a coalition of groups to reduce the needed cuts by extending the state's income tax surcharge on higher-income New Yorkers.

"The (CFE) promise is consistently, year after year, broken and pushed back," Assemblyman Bill Colton, D-Brooklyn, said during the hearing. "That is something that is not good for efforts to have the school community work together."

Duffy reiterated the proposed cuts do not have to mean layoffs, and added "the state and governor are still committed to the CFE ruling."

Activists were skeptical. "It's good that the governor keeps saying he is committed to CFE, but his budget proposal reflects no such commitment," said Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, said in a statement. "In fact, it essentially undoes that commitment."